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Painting is like occupying an empty suitcase.
I was drawn to baggage, in the sense of luggage, the suitcase, as an evocative symbol for freedom of movement and the anxiety of homelessness, a place to put it all. The luxury of travel and the rootlessness of the dispossessed came to cohabit in scenes of baggage-claim areas and piles of luggage waiting to be collected.ext I began to focus on the interior of the suitcase, in images of a suitcase being packed, an allusion to the packing of a metaphor. The difference between the scuffed and scarred exterior and the plushly appointed interior seduced me.
I begin paintings as larks, jokes or problems and I finsh them like religous paintings.
My paintings of the interiors of rooms are meditations on the empty suitcase, the same box being packed and repacked with different objects. What I call the “Cave Paintings” 1994 are concerned with a sense of shelter and with specific accommodations, rarely with where this place is. Rooms, corners, ceilings, and doors become places into which a subject can expand, places where defenses can be let down, where a subject can float into imaginative flight and unguarded repose. Like taking in a deep breath and letting it out, to internalize a place, a privacy, or a pause seems to allow consciousness, seems to allow a subject to exist. The place occupied by a subject, the place of collecting oneself, seems, like the process in an object, to embrace the material and to expand the implication of the imagination imbedded in the symbol.
I am drawn to allegory, with its assemblies of signs, symbols, metaphors, displacements, dramas, cycles, and authority problems.
The relationship between object and process is something I thought I knew about, being a painter; the work of making something in my studio, with intuition and anxiety that is familiar to me. But the making without knowing, introduced me to the ghost in my machine. Knowing a painting as an object and as a site, I can understand them as environments making objects into places. To me it suggests a threshold. The perception of an object as an environment or place, a familiar state of being with both its own inertia and its own drive, thrills and confronts me as a maker, a viewer, and a subject.
My habit is deliberately to lose myself in order to approach the familiar from a different angle.
I imagine myself comfortably between two extremes, agoraphobia and claustrophobia, the cardinal navigation points of my work. Being either thrown into the world or boxed up, feeling either exposed or homebound, frames my dilemma.
I use representation to contain a place that provides a subject with shelter and occupation. The navigational aspects of perspective provide entry to a picture allowing a sensory body access to a space. The unthought fit of the maker’s measurements on the made gives dimension to that place between representation and presence.
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